Sermon for April 13, 2008

“Let me set this before you as plainly as I can. If a person climbs over or through the fence of a sheep pen instead of going through the gate, you know he’s up to no good—a sheep rustler! The shepherd walks right up to the gate. The gatekeeper opens the gate to him and the sheep recognize his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he gets them all out, he leads them and they follow because they are familiar with his voice. They won’t follow a stranger’s voice but will scatter because they aren’t used to the sound of it.”

“Jesus told this simple story, but they had no idea what he was talking about. So he tried again. ‘I’ll be explicit, then. I am the Gate for the sheep. All those others are up to no good—sheep stealers, every one of them. But the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the Gate. Anyone who goes through me will be cared for—will freely go in and out, and find pasture. A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.” (John 10:1-10, Eugene Peterson, The Message.)

I love Eugene Peterson’s translation of this text. It’s so straight forward and to the point. The text itself is full of complications and competing analogies and yet at its base is a text of compassion, love and divine grace. And that’s good news, especially for people like me who haven’t had a lustrous history with the Gospel of John. Me and this good shepherd passage have had an interesting, rather sordid history.

When I was in seminary, this was the Sunday every single first year student had to preach. These sheep grew fangs and the shepherd seemed armed with something much more lethal than a crook when faced with a congregation staring back for the very first time. Sermons were cliché and full of every term from our Systematic Theology classes (which we were taking that semester) we could fit. They were truly bad. Like most of my classmates, I disposed of any shred of evidence of that first sermon.

Then there was one of the first funerals I ever did where, as usual, the 23rd Psalm was requested. The Psalm read that day was not of the King James variety. One lady cautioned me that if I read the NRSV version of the 23rd Psalm at her funeral, she’d come back to haunt me. I’ll never make that mistake again.

Then there was the Sunday School class where it seemed like a good idea to make shepherds crooks out of wrapping paper tubes and duct tape. The subsequent skit took a turn for the worse as all of the sheep somehow needed to be beaten into submission by all of the shepherds holding those weapons, I mean crooks.

As I looked back over the years in Penn Yan, I realized I only preached on this text once, as they were all farmers and immediately after that one sermon, I was told exactly what misinformation I had given on the intellectual ability of sheep. So, if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon steer clear of the whole subject of the fuzzy little critters.

But there was a day, a long, long time ago, when Good Shepherd Sunday was my absolute favorite Sunday of the entire year. Actually, it was my entire childhood Sunday School career. I LOVED Good Shepherd Sunday. Why, you may ask. It was because every single year my Sunday school teacher would show up with a stack of papers fresh off the mimeograph machine, bags of cotton balls and bottles of Elmer’s Glue. The papers had an out line of a sheep. Once we heard the story, once the flannel board was put away, once we were finished politely answering questions and saying our prayer, we were allowed to gather around the craft table and begin the best project in the whole wide world.

The tops of the bottles of glue would be twisted open and we would pick at the hardened glue until the plug came out and we were SUPPOSED to dab the glue onto the cotton balls and then stick the cotton balls onto the paper; but it was so much more fun to POUR the glue on the paper and then smear it all over the outline of that sheep with our fingers and then, after wiping the glue on our good church clothes, make every attempt to stick the cotton balls to make our fuzzy sheep. More cotton stuck to our hands than to our pictures.

It was such a joy to leave Sunday School; glue smeared all over us and somehow the cotton stuck to our faces, our clothing, our hair. I think we must have looked like fuzzy little sheep. And then we’d run outside to play until Church started and the white fuzz turned brown and dirty and sweaty and our mother’s were less than pleased at our appearance.

But we were sheep and we looked like sheep and Jesus called us by name and we knew his voice and we were loved for being grimy, dirty little sheep.

I don’t know much about sheep, that is true, but I do know something about children and about people and about the grace of God. I know that we often think there is a right approach to life. We think there is an outline on the paper and we have to dab exactly the right amount of glue on the paper. And fill in that outline with all of the correct activities and answers and knowledge. We think there is a correct way to raise our children; a certain amount of giving we should aspire to; a certain amount of volunteering that we should happily jump into. But unfortunately life doesn’t work like that. Most days it feels like somebody just keeps dumping the bottle of Elmer’s until we’re completely stuck. And all we can do is keep smearing it more and more as requests for our time and our resources just keep piling up at our feet.

And we leave here to go out into a world that’s just plain frightening: Are our jobs secure? Are our children safe? Where will the next gunfire explode? What next superbug/virus/epidemic will course through our hospitals and neighborhoods? Who will be afflicted next? What about my marriage, is it doomed to fail? The dirt of the world sticks to us turning our fuzzy white fur all dingy and dirty. And no matter how hard we try, we just keep getting dirtier and dirtier.

This text isn’t about the sheep, the creatures; it’s about the creator, the caretaker. Jesus never promises us an outline to follow. In fact, from the get go in this text, Jesus acknowledges that there are thieves, sheep rustlers, killers and destroyers. Jesus doesn’t promise that if we crawl into the sheep pen we’ll be free from all harm or hardship. Those are the realities of life.

No, this text is about the savior who comes in the midst of the hardship, the pain; the illness, the divorce, the pink slip, the rejection. This is about a savior who knows us when we are at our lowest, our dirtiest, when we barely recognize ourselves and still calls us by name and invites us to follow. This text is about a savior who tends to our every need; for washing, for feeding, for companionship and addresses and meets all of those needs.

This is a story that invites us fully and wholly into the grace of God. There is one shepherd whose love is big enough for a world full of sheep. There aren’t little individual sheep pens, some loved more than others, some left outside of the scope of grace. There is one pen and it’s big enough to hold all the sheep and it’s tended by the one shepherd who created us, redeemed us and sustains us with his unending mercy and love.

Let me say this as plainly as I can. Jesus came so that we can have life, real and eternal life, more and better life than you ever dreamed of.

Amen

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